Book sales are stagnant. I'm not talking about the numbers, though. I'm talking about the titles. This week's NYTimes bestseller list read like a Xerox of June 2007's: A Thousand Splendid Suns, I Am America, The Dangerous Book for Boys...how can this be? The ranking authors are even more tired tried and true: James Patterson, Sue Grafton, Dean Koontz. Zzzz...

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Via Reuters: Joel and Ethan Coen win the 20th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award for their film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country For Old Men. Who else thinks that The Nanny Diaries was robbed? (Cue: crickets chirping)

The Wagner Clan ain't nuthin' to f**k with. English biographer Jonathan Carr dishes the dirt on Germany's most famous musical family...and what dirt there is! One of them -- Wagner's granddaughter, Winifred -- used to call Hitler by a pet name, 'Wolf,' and was so smitten with Der Fuhrer that she attended Hitler Youth reunions until her death in 1980.

Via AFP: "China's ruling Communist Party will release an anti-graft comic book during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday to help officials avoid corruption. The pocket-size comic book, which includes caricatures depicting common forms of graft and bribery, will be distributed as a gift to 100,000 party members."

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Publisher's Weekly lists the 15 Trends To Watch in 2008. E-books take up nine spots. Of the remaining six, three have to do with publishers' websites, two have to do with the pros & cons of Barnes & Noble's "sophisticated supply chain," and one hints strongly at the elimination of traveling sales reps. Cheery.

It's a bad time for literary fiction, and the librarians are to blame. From the GuardianUK: "(There has been) a shift in the priorities of libraries, which used to be a guaranteed haven for several thousand copies of hardbacks that take a bit of brain work, but which are now rapidly ceding shelf-space to Citizens Advice Bureau leaflets or DVDs." (Editor's note: The Inkwell unequivocally absolves all sexy librarians of any blame.)

Locus Magazine interviews fantasy/SF author Nnedi Okorafor (Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker) about a wide variety of topics, the most interesting to me being why science fiction hasn't made further inroads in Africa: "I guess people write what they know. From my experience with the Nigerians, most don't read stuff specially categorized as ‘fantastical.’ (...) Maybe this category doesn’t exist in Nigeria because it’s not needed. The fantastical is naturally a part of the Nigerian world already.”

Princess Diana's controversy-courting biographer, Andrew Morton, has completed his unauthorized book on Tom Cruise. In it, Morton claims that Cruise is now the second in command of the Church of Scientology, and "suggests" that Cruise's daughter, Suri, was conceived using frozen sperm from the movement's dead founder L Ron Hubbard. Needless to say, the Church of Scientology is suing the author and his publisher, St Martin's Press, while fear of legal reprisal has already caused the cancellation of the book's publication in the UK.

BostonNow.com suggests that Barack Obama's reason for not having a plan to reduce foreign corporate control of the U.S. book publishing industry (and other U.S. media industries) is based -- at least partially -- around the $1.7 million two-book contract that he received from the Random House/Crown Publishers/Alfred Knopf subsidiary division of Bertelsmann AG. Does BostonNow.com have any proof? Of course not. But they're a blog, so they don't have to, right?